Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has been pursuing a lawsuit against the FBI for records on the agency’s drone program. A recent filing in the case suggests the FBI has either lied to the public about the scope of its drone program or it has inaccurately defended the need to keep documents [...]

In the first United States drone strike of the new year, at least six people were reported to be killed on January 4. The strike came as Pakistan killed at least 31 alleged “militants” in an offensive the US has been helping the country’s military forces wage against militant groups the US has long maintained [...]

The Associated Press has reported that the United States government agreed to “restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace” over an area surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for a period of 12 days in order to keep news helicopters from covering protests and the police response to them. The protests took place after Michael Brown, an [...]

As a result of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times, President Barack Obama’s administration has released the first memo authored by federal appeals court judge and former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer David Barron to justify the killing of US citizen and terrorism suspect [...]

Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by United States and NATO military forces since 2001, but, according to Amnesty International, there have been only six cases in which the US military has “criminally prosecuted” officers for “unlawfully killing civilians.” The human rights organization put out a report [PDF] containing ten cases of apparent war [...]

When you are saying something true, pure, clean and right, you often do not need many words. Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is beautiful in its brevity. Americans may not “…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” There are no footnotes in [...]

The mistakes of U.S. foreign policy are mostly based on the same flawed idea: that the world is a chessboard on which the U.S. makes moves, or manipulates proxies to make moves, that either defeat, counter or occasionally face setbacks from the single opponent across the table. The game held up for a fair amount [...]

A global security think tank in Washington, DC, has released a report on President Barack Obama’s drone policy. It raises several concerns about the erosion of “sovereignty norms, blowback and the potential for never-ending war and suggests the administration has fought what amounts to a “multi-year covert killing program.” But what is most remarkable is [...]

A redacted legal memo produced to justify the “targeted killing” of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by the CIA in a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011, was finally released after a federal appeals court ordered its disclosure. The memo [PDF] had been the subject of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the American [...]

I think of it now, all the time. Sometimes I think I even recognize a place on TV I had been, having spent a year in the midst of America’s Occupation in Iraq, 2009-2010. I was a State Department civilian, embedded in turn with two Army brigades of some 3000 men and women each, far [...]